#536
Title: Selections from James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson
Author: James Boswell
Editor: Robert William Chapman
Publisher: Oxford
Year: 1821
220 pages
I
understand and appreciate this biography's historical import in terms
of the way biographies are constructed, just as I appreciate the ways in
which Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Woolf altered the shape and focus of
the novel. However, I find that I love neither Boswell, who seems to be a
sycophantic toady, nor Johnson, so many of whose bon mots are merely
forms of insult and aspersion. This quickly wore on me and soon became
unbearably tedious. I'd have preferred to read much more about Johnson's
construction of the dictionary, a still-topical subject that has a
great advantage over obscure, class-riddled jibes at the expense of
many, many other people. Let us not refer to male privilege, pray let us
not.
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